Meet Basil John Bulbrook

I do a lot of genealogy research. My maternal side, Bulbrook, is a rather unusual but not totally uncommon name, so I've come across a few of them that are not related. Generally, if they are outside of London they are not mine. My Bulbrooks tended to stay in the same area for generations, probably because they were too poor to move far. About the only far-off place they went was to the poorhouse. Mind you they did move a lot around the neighbourhood but they were living in a pretty slummy area of London so there could have been many reasons. 

Another interesting thing about my Bulbrooks is that they all look alike, so when I came across this person I just KNEW that he had to be a relative. He is the spitting image of all my uncles. So I did some backward digging, from him upwards until I found someone familiar. And I was right, he's my 4th cousin, once removed.  

Here is how we are related through Thomas Bulbrook (1775-1841): 

Basil John Bulbrook 1911-1942
Percy Owen Bulbrook 1875-1949 
George Thomas Bulbrook 1850-1931
Thomas Augustus Bulbrook 1830-1868
Thomas Augustus Bulbrook 1805-?
Thomas Bulbrook 1775-1841
Joseph Albion Bulbrook 1809-1893
George J Bulbrook 1842-1869
Alfred Edward Bulbrook 1864-1906
Robert Walter Bulbrook 1898-1960
Doris Martha Bulbrook 1924-1985
Cynde Louise Durnford

His name is Basil John Bulbrook, born in the second quarter of 1911 in St. Mawes, Cornwall, England to Percy Owen and Jessie Read (nee Adams) Bulbrook. It looks like his side of the family moved around England a lot. From Southwark, London, Kent area, Lincolnshire, Wales, and then Cornwall. His father was a seafaring man in the Royal Navy which would explain all his moves. Apparently, he met a girl in Cornwall and settled down there, and started working for the Coastguard. 

I have to say that this branch of the family did much better than mine, George Thomas (1850-1931) was a schoolteacher. The three Thomases and Joseph were shoe/boot makers. His branch did well considering our common relative Thomas was in the poorhouse in 1810 with his wife and sons Thomas and Joseph. Later Joseph and his six children would end up in the workhouse in 1848. Staying in Southwark definitely was not beneficial to my branch. 

So back to Basil. He grew up in Cornwall, he is listed as a baby on the 1911 census and age 10 on the 1921 census. By this time his older brother Percy Alexander has gone out to sea (he because a 2nd Mate in the Merchant Marines in 1923) having started out as a wireless operator for the post office. 

Basil was the only other surviving son and in 1939 he followed his brother into the Merchant Marines. Unfortunately for Basil, WWII broke out. During the first few years of the war, he made numerous trips between England and New York City. In 1941 he was the 5th Engineer on the SS Adula and in 1942 he was the engineering office on the Telesfora de Larrinaga. 

On 3 November 1942 Basil was a passenger on the SS. Ceramic. I'm not sure why he was a passenger.

The SS Ceramic left Liverpool for Australia via Saint Helena and South Africa. She was carrying 377 passengers, 264 crew, 14 DEMS gunners, and 12,362 tons of cargo. 244 of the passengers were military or naval, including at least 145 British Army, 30 Royal Navy, 14 Royal Australian Navy, and 12 Royal Marines. 30 of her British Army passengers were QAIMNS nursing sisters. The other 133 passengers were fare-paying civilians. 12 were children, the youngest being a one-year-old baby girl. Six were doctors, five of whom were South African. One passenger was Rudolph Dolmetsch (1906–42), a classical musician and composer, then serving as Regimental Bandmaster with the Royal Artillery.

Ceramic sailed with Convoy ON 149 until it dispersed as scheduled in the North Atlantic. She then continued unescorted as planned. As on her previous departure in January, she first headed west because of the threat of an enemy attack. At midnight on 6–7 December, in cold weather and rough seas in the mid-Atlantic, U-515 hit Ceramic with a single torpedo. These were followed two or three minutes later by two more that hit Ceramic's engine room, stopping her engines and her electric lighting. The liner radioed a distress signal, which was received by the Emerald-class cruiser HMS Enterprise. The crippled liner stayed afloat and her complement abandoned the ship in good order, launching about eight lifeboats all full of survivors.

About three hours later U-515 fired two more torpedoes, which broke the ship's back and sank her immediately. By now it was very stormy and raining. The heavy sea capsized some of the lifeboats and left many people struggling in the water. Those boats that were not capsized stayed afloat only by constant baling. 

The next morning the U-boat HQ ordered U-515 to return to the position of the sinking to find out the ship's destination. About noon the U-boat commander, Kapitänleutnant Werner Henke, decided to rescue the Ceramic's skipper. In heavy seas, he sighted one of the lifeboats and its occupants waved to him. The storm was now almost Force 10 and almost swamping U-515's conning tower, so Henke ordered his crew to make do with the first survivor they could find. This turned out to be Sapper Eric Munday of the Royal Engineers, whom they rescued from the water and took prisoner aboard the submarine.No other occupants of the lifeboats survived. The storm was too severe for neutral rescue ships from São Miguel Island in the Azores to put to sea. On 9 December the Portuguese Douro-class destroyer NRP Dão was sent to search for survivors but found none. Munday was kept prisoner aboard U-515 for a month, including Christmas and New Year, until she completed her patrol. When she returned to Lorient, Brittany on 6 January 1943 he was landed at Lorient U-boat base and sent to Stalag VIII-B in Upper Silesia, where he remained a prisoner of war until 1945. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Ceramic]